The contingent workforce, including contractors and freelancers, has grown recently, making management challenging. A Vendor Management System (VMS) can help. This article explores how a VMS improves contingent workforce management.
Managing a non-employee workforce can be quite intricate. Temporary workers and the staffing vendors that bring them on board generate numerous data entry points for your organization.
Without an automated and efficient system to handle this vast amount of data, your business risks wasting valuable time, overpaying vendors, lacking insight into your workforce, and possibly misclassifying workers.
To ensure your company meets its workforce goals and effectively manages its non-employee workforce, it is essential to implement a vendor management system (VMS).
What is a VMS?
A VMS is a cloud-based software platform that automates and consolidates the management of your entire non-employee workforce in one centralized location.
With a vendor management system, you can manage the entire non-employee hiring process with one comprehensive solution, from engaging with a staffing vendor, sourcing talent, acquiring temporary workers, and managing them while they are with your company to paying their final pay cheque.
Whether your organization has 100 temporary workers or 10,000, a VMS will ensure you are able to manage procurement, measure vendor performance, facilitate onboarding, track payments, and store data through every step of your non-employee hiring process.
How Does a VMS Benefit the way you manage your Contingent Workforce?
By using VMS software to consolidate the management of your entire non-employee workforce in one place, your organization will see a huge number of benefits. These include everything from significant money savings, improved operational efficiencies and better visibility into your company’s workforce.
Here are the top five benefits that your organization will realize from the use of a VMS:
#1 - Better workforce visibility
By managing your non-employee workforce on one centralized cloud-based system, you will significantly improve the visibility you have into your external workforce. The result? You’ll be able to quickly identify opportunities for improvement in process, supplier service, quality and cost.
Visibility lets you know exactly how many non-permanent workers you have on board, the precise figure of how much your business is spending, and complete visibility into your workforce needed to prevent costly misclassifications.
#2 - Complete workforce automation
Many organizations still manage their non-employee workforce on excel spreadsheets and emails. With so many data points from staffing vendors and temporary workers, ensuring accurate data entry and updates through time-consuming manual processes is a huge challenge.
Automating this process through the use of a VMS, however, will ensure your company doesn’t waste time or make data entry errors. A vendor management system will automate the management of your external workforce, from sourcing, vetting, time entry and approval, onboarding, offboarding, invoicing and much more.
#3 - Consolidate your vendors in one centralized location
Hiring the top talent in your industry involves managing a wide number of vendors, with thousands of transactions. Manually tracking these costs leads to invisible expenses, such as overpaying vendors or hiring the wrong temporary workers.
A VMS will consolidate these vendor transactions into one centralized location. That means not only will you be able to ensure that you aren’t overpaying your vendors, but you’ll also be able to track vendor performance management through reporting and analytics.
#4 - Save money and improve efficiencies
A vendor management system will help your business implement procedures that will help you achieve significant cost savings. You can load all of your pre-negotiated rates as well as utilize a reverse auction process which creates open vendor competition and drives down costs. In addition, utilizing a VMS means invoices never have errors. This will save your company money, improve your internal operations and ensure compliance with your internal policies.
#5 - Reporting and analytics
Vendor management systems provide your organization with the benchmark data and in-depth analytics that help your business meet those constantly evolving non-employee workforce targets.
Through VMS reporting analytics your company will have clear visibility into spend categorization, vendor performance, tenure management and quality metrics such as time-to-fill or workforce turnover. This ensures your company is able to make better hiring decisions and, ultimately, save money.
Check out our Contingent Workforce Management Guide:
About Conexis VMS
Conexis is an award-winning VMS tailored specifically for mid-market contingent workforce programs. Leveraging the latest technology, Conexis delivers the expertise, reliability and security of enterprise systems, while offering the flexibility, user friendliness and tailored service you require. Conexis delivers enterprise level software - without the enterprise level complexity.
Contact Us
Whether you are looking to change your VMS solution, or just getting started, we are here to help. Contact Us for a Free No-Obligation Consultation to discuss your workforce challenges (and get immediate actionable insights). See how easy Conexis is to use by taking a quick 2 minute Self-Guided Tour, or Book a Personal Demo Today!
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